Hard drive failure nightmare! Can anyone help???

[Animal]

Mac G4 800, PT LE 5/6, 001

My 250 gig external drive, which I use mostly for backup (also have some stuff on there like my itunes library) started dying. The disk wouldn't start, or if it did, it would just stop and unmount itself. If I turned it off when it unmounted itself, I was scolded and told that a drive was not put away right and that I might lose data. The problem came on pretty quick - not much warning.

5 pm Saturday: I picked up a 300 gig drive, pulled my internal dedicated music hard drive (80 gig), stuck the 300 gig in there and copied all the files from my external, which was a nightmare in itself: the drive, which had been on it's last leg, suddenly crossed the line and for a few desperate hours I wasn't able to get it to start at all. But ultimately I got it copied over - one folder at a time.

4 am Sunday: OK, one obstacle overcome.

10 am Sunday: I stuck the 300 gig drive in my computer and put the 80 gig drive in the external enclosure I'd been using. The 80 gig drive started sounding a little weird, sometimes not mounting, so I took it out and stuck it back in the computer and put my 300 gig on the shelf. Not only was my external drive totally [bleep], it seems as if my external enclosure is part of the problem. And it may have screwed up my 80 gig drive?

1 pm Sunday: I did a PT session, running it off my internal 80 gig drive. Following so far? Session was fine, client was happy. No problems

4 pm Sunday: The [bleep] started hitting the fan. Suddenly, I try to open another session (big, many versions, lots of audio, etc.) and I get some crazy warning box with a red stopsign and a "halt" hand. Wouldn't open my session. Didn't recognize certain lines of program code or something, something about directories and roots I think. Whatever it said, it was FAR from the usual. Then my OSX boot drive suddenly disappeared. A restart fixed that and I rebooted in OSX, and then my OS9 boot drive disappeared! Then my desktop froze, not allowing me to open ANY drive, nor alow me to restart on the other boot drive. After multiple hard restarts, the problem went away, but now my 80 gig drive was frozen or something....it wouldn't let me open it. [bleep].

So what's the big deal, right? I have all that backed up on the 300 gig drive, right? Well, mostly. I"m working with a band on a big project and frankly, I don't know if I backed up after our last session, two sessions ago, or three sessions ago. I could wipe the 80 gig drive and rebuild it from the last backup, but I don't even have a functional enclosure to put it in for now so I can't even do that.

7 pm Sunday: No problem. Time to stop dicking around and pull out the Norton Utilities. Surprise, surprise, it's reporting the my 80 gig drive has MAJOR PROBLEMS, and that Norton can't fix them. I run disk doctor multiple times, as recommended by Norton, but to no avail. I ran disk doctor and speed disk (to defrag) my other drives (minor errors, which Norton could fix). Then I tried to use the recover volume function on my 80 gig drive, which helped. Now I can access the files from the drive again. But when I try to open that session I was talking about, Pro Tools suddenly asks where bits of audio are, and when I point it to the right file (snare.01_12.aif or whatever) it says it's not a file formatt that Pro Tools understands!! And it doesn't matter which of the dozen versions of the sessions I open. It clearly says ".aif," so I'm just stupified.

Pro Tools WILL, however, open some more recent stuff.

What the hell is going on? To have my hard drive AND my back up hard drive fail on the same day??? My boot drives freezing? Major drive errors that Norton can't fix?

I just don't get it. Can anyone help make sense of this, or offer some advice? :cry:

[maccool]

First, get Disk Warrior. Drop-kick Norton through the goalposts of oblivion, never to darken you door again, and pray that it hasn't done irreparable damage.

Run Disk Warrior from the CD on all your drives and see if it can repair them. Be warned, and be patient, DW can take a long time (hours sometimes), but it is the disk utility of choice for Mac's. Norton starts out thinking it can fix the problem, and then finds that it can't, but by that time it's already written changes to your drive. DW won't do anything to your drive until you ask it to rebuild the directory.

Every time you do a hard restart you risk corrupting the directory on mounted volumes.

You don't say what your external enclosure is.

[Animal]

Thanks, that sounds like great advice. I'll pick up DW.

My enclosure is a Wiebetech ultraGB. I'm sending it in to them for repair/replacement. I'm sending the 250 gig WD in for repair/replacement.

I only do hard restarts when it's my last option. When force quiting won't do the trick and I can't do a soft restart, when I'm driven to it by the spinning beach ball of death, or other such situations.

Perhaps there are other solutions to those kinds of problems that I'm not aware of?

[maccool]

yeah, sometimes a hard restart is the only thing you can do, and it doesn't always screw things up, but then again it can. When you have to do it, running DW straight away will take care of any little bits of damage which may have occurred, and those little bits can add up over time. Provided you can insert the DW CD before, or during, the hard restart then you can boot to the CD first thing.

As for why this all started in the first place, who knows? It could one or more of so many things. I'd be inclined to go for a full clean install of OS and PT, and run Apple Hardware Test too if you have it, and go from there.

Also, despite the claims of FireWire's hot-swap capability, I never hot-swap a FW drive. Unmount, power down, and then disconnect the drive.

[cleft]

I second the DW recommendation. The benefit being that Norton simply tries to patch the problems in your directory which DiskWarrior completely rebuilds it. Also, check out this great MacWorld article on general OSX maintenance. A great resource for when you do get back to normal, though none of this can fix hardware problems.

Prevent Mac Disasters

Hope it all works out for you in the end.

[maccool]

cleft,

damned good link, thank you.

Animal,

keep us posted on how you make out.

[Animal]

Thanks, everybody.

I checked that article out yesterday, along with one about mac maintenance. Looks like there are a lot of preventative measures I should be taking. So once I'm back up and running I'll start implementing those.

My local computer store didn't have DW so I'm going to have to bus it down to the apple store today to pick it up. In the meantime I repaired my permissions, cleared my logs, emptied my caches, and reinstalled PT. Things seem to have stabalized, but I still can't open some sessions - PT tells me that it can't recognize some of the ".aif" files within the audio folder. I still can't figure that one out. I have a slightly older versions of those mixes backed up, and once I get my backup drive in an enclosure, I'm hoping I can just use the audio from there to use in the sessions from the other drive. We'll see.

Incidentally, I think I identified part of the problem: My external drive was a Western Digital, my internal is a Seagate. When I swapped them (so I could back up my failing external drive) I switched the jumpers so they where in the same position on both drives. Turns out that when the jumper is in position one on the WD, it makes it a cable drive, and when the jumper is in position one on the 80 gig Seagate, it reduces it's max capacity to 32 gigs!!!! What the hell? I don't know why they would include a jumper setting for that.... Anyway, I assume that once I accidentally put the jumper in that spot it was unable to read data on the other HALF of my drive, and fragmentation being what it is, I'm sure that only parts of files where lost, rendering the whole files, in some cases, unreadable. Unfortunately I reformatted my drive BEFORE making that discovery - but I did copy important files to another location.

My 250 gig drive is on it's way back to Western Digital for repair/replacement (my warrantly is good until 2007!), and the enclosure is on it's way back to Wiebetech for repair/replacement.

And I'm learning a TON about mac maintenance, file management and data backup!

[maccool]

I'm glad that it looks like you'll be able to recover what you thought you'd lost. The failure of the WiebeTech enclosure has to be unusual, but it does highlight the need for two backups, each in a separate location. Had that backup been to two mirrored drives in the same enclosure then the backup might have been useless! Food for thought.

[Animal]

Good point! The failure of the enclosure is still uncertain. It's possible that the enclosure is fine and the problem was the drives (one failed, one with improper jumper placement). At any rate, I guess enclosures do fail. Food for thought indeed.


I should add that the Wiebetech folks have been very good about dealing with it. My warranty expired about 20 days ago, but they give you a 30 day grace period. The offered to fix/replace it, or give me a discount on they're newer drive enlcosure. God do I love good tech support.